In reply to a post by jchamier:

So Sky fibre users will be sharing capacity from the exchange back to the Sky core network with Sky ADSL users.

... and, boy, can it cause problems where Sky fibre take up is higher than expected. We had a few months of virtually unusable peak time broadband, as in sub 2 Mbps download speeds on a 70 Mbps fibre connection with 600ms pings in my case, until Sky upgraded the backhaul to 10 Gbit.

The beauty of Sky unlike virginmedia is that whenever there's a backhaul issue casuing slowdowns Sky fix it. They upgrade things and you then see full speeds 24/7 even during peak times. It's rare that this occurs though.

Virgin just leave it as do plenty of ISPs.

I have the fibre service. The backhaul is shared with the ADSL connections. I sync at 80 down 20 up. I get the full speeds even during evenings. I live in a student area where the connections are obviously being hammered by them. If Skys handling fibre this well, it can easily handle slower ADSL connections with ease.

In reply to a post by iand:

I would agree with some of the other comments. Take your current download speed and drop 2M from it and thats what you will get with SKY. That is what happened to me.

My speeds were pretty consistent with every other ISP. As a general rule of thumb. If you can get 20+ days without a single drop out you'll probably see very little decrease / increase.

If your line does sometimes drop out, expect a decrease. Sky love stability.

It's a good technique and strategy. The average joe bloggs customers generally don't check their internet speeds. They prefer a service that never goes off and works perfectly over a fast unstable one.

Then most average Joe Bloggs don't use the master socket, use a cheapo 10m white flat extension and have dogey internal wiring. With Sky their line is 100% stable despite all of this. They are happy and say 'my previous ISP always went on and off but Sky never goes off, it's brilliant.'